Generally, software systems use unique numbers for identification of particular objects or items, to comply with established rules, e.g., statutory and/or legal requirements. For instance, in various business software systems, the generated documents have to be uniquely numbered, and also the numbers must be continuous without any gaps or not-used numbers. Examples of such documents may include different types of logistic documents, e.g., sales orders, delivery and billing documents. Typically, the numbering of documents of different types is provided within a common number range. Such a common number range can be divided into several number range intervals, which can be used, e.g., to distinguish between the different types of documents.
FIG. 1 illustrates an example of a common scenario (100) for uniquely and subsequently numbering of documents of different types in a software system. Usually, the software systems define one or more internal numbering objects to provide subsequent numbers within a range of predefined length upon request. Number range object (NRO) 105 is an example numbering object providing subsequent numerical numbers between ‘0000000000’ and ‘9999999999’. The illustrated number range has length of ten digits or positions, as this is a typical requirement for numbering legally bound documents (herein also called ‘legal documents’), but other lengths are also possible depending on the definition of the NRO 105. As illustrated in FIG. 1, the number range of NRO 105 is split into one hundred intervals, e.g., NRO interval 1 (110) to NRO interval 100 (130). The separate intervals may be assigned to separate document types and/or to separate partners. Respectively, the subsequent numbering of different types of documents, e.g., docs 1 (115) to docs 100 (135) could be provided within corresponding separate intervals. The number and the length of the separate intervals may be determined by a prefix with predefined length. In the illustrated example, the first two digits of the number range of the NRO 105 are used as a prefix to split the range into 100 (e.g., 102) intervals.
Technically, the available numbers are limited, since the number field for the legal documents is defined with a particular length (e.g., ten characters). Also, the number of number range intervals is limited, e.g., by the length of the prefix. Therefore, for some business areas, this restriction in the numbering ranges can be problematic.
For example, in wholesale or consumer products a company may map its own business into an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, and in addition to that, the business processes of collaborative partners, which are, e.g., taking care of specific follow-on processes. In some cases, these partners may even have access to the system and may be allowed to create and change logistic documents within their own area of accountability. One such example is the handling of so-called distributors, which are usually mapped as own company codes. Thus, the numbering of the billing documents (e.g. invoices, customer notifications, etc.), which have a direct link to financials, may require individual number range intervals per distributor to guarantee a subsequent numbering without any not-used numbers for each distributor. However, such a requirement may lead to a severe problem for providing numbers for the documents. For large companies, a common scenario is having at least several thousand distributors generating several hundred thousand invoices (or more) per year. The billing process of these distributors may also require different types of billing documents, e.g., at least three different types of legal binding documents may be used—invoices, customer notifications, debit notes, etc. For such a volume, the sole usage of number range intervals of an internal NRO will obviously not be sufficient. For example, the available (internal) numbers for billing documents only provide up to 10 billion numbers. On the other hand the numbers needed for a runtime of 10 years of such a company could roughly be estimated to 75 billion (e.g. multiplying 5,000 distributors, three of billing type documents, 500,000 of documents per type per year for the next 10 years).
A simple technical extension of the number range is not easy to achieve, because this would lead to an adaption of a large number of coding with a high risk for new errors.